Sopor Aeternus
Dead Lovers' Sarabande - Face Two

Sopor re-invents the Middle Ages. Continuously analyzing and experimenting, in his compositions there is an echo of the spirit that permeates medieval and Renaissance thought: the order that encompasses chaos and variants, enclosing them in a higher design.

The instruments he uses are trumpets, flutes, violins, and various types of guitars, sometimes accompanied by the synthesizer and real percussion: with these and his singing, he creates atmospheres that are sometimes solemn, sometimes gentle, and intensely melancholic.

"Sonno Eterno" refers to a band consisting of an individual to whom only recently a flesh-and-blood drummer has been added. It involves a German whose only known name is the one he coined for himself after his desire to become a woman, Anna-Varney Cantodea. As noted from an interview, however, his aspiration resulted in an innocuous digital touch-up to the self-image appearing on the cover of the 2003 album "Es Reiten Die Toten So Schnell", where he intends to present himself devoid of male attributes. But he hasn't undergone surgery, thank goodness! Because in my opinion, he has the warmest, most sensual, and masculine voice since Jim Morrison died. Sometimes he uses his voice naturally, but in many pieces, he puts it in the service of a recitative in music with exacerbated tones that sometimes add interest and intensity to the track, while in others, they are so grotesque that they become irritating.

And here I come to the central point of my dissert... I mean, review... and I apologize if to do this, I expand the discourse to several albums of this complex character. I indeed want to emphasize that I consider the vast production of S. A. to be vastly different in quality. If the tracks were all like those I consider masterpieces, namely Va(r)itas Vanitas in this "Dead Lovers' Sarabande Face 2", or, from the same album, No One is There, or Never Trust the Obvious from the album "The Inexperienced Spiral Traveller", or Lament and The Sleeper from "Dead Lovers' Face One", forget 5 stars! There should be a way to give at least 27! But pearls, in the case of Anna Varney, are rare, and among the 12 albums released from 1989 to now, I've discovered at most a dozen. The quality of his pieces varies much more than in the case of many other medieval/gothic/folk groups. Does someone want to know if they'll like Dargaard, Verbannten Kinder Evas, Avrigus, Gothica, Ophelia's Dream, Trobar de Morte, to name a few? It will suffice to hear two or three tracks from one of their albums, and they'll have an idea of compatibility with their tastes. It's not like this with S. A.
When I set out to listen to an album for the first time, I'm anxious, knowing there will be beautiful tracks, others mediocre, and probably some unlistenable ones, hoping to find the one whose unique beauty made it worth the purchase. It’s like buying a box full of clothes without seeing them beforehand only to discover that many are nice, others passable or insignificant, others utterly ridiculous... but a couple are the most perfect clothes I've ever worn, and then yes, they were money well spent!

Coming to "Dead Lovers' Sarabande Face Two", track number 6, which lasts over nine minutes and is titled Vanitas Va(r)nitas, is my favorite. Trumpet blasts open the piece with a powerful and cadenced refrain, surprisingly interrupted by the synthesizer that separates the melody from the second stunning refrain with the trumpets. And here come the violins, forming the variant on which a third melody hooks in a harmonious overlapping with the previous one like voices in a chorus that compliment each other. We return to the original refrain, this time played with the flute and whose rhythm is marked by the violin, upon which the xylophone sweetly enters successively, followed by the discreet drums. The singing begins, in German: "Le ossa bruciano a 760 gradi...". A series of melody variations follow, the introduction of tambourines, singing with a natural, warm, and deep voice, a festive chorus that evokes the joyful atmosphere of a medieval village festival, and then we return to the powerful initial refrain played with the trumpet and repeated with few variations many times, concluding with a small dissonant tail.

Track no. 4, titled No One is There, is very different but equally beautiful in its poignant melancholy. The melody is a single one, introduced by the plucking of the guitar, followed by the very sad and modulated voice of Anna Varney. The singing is interspersed with the sound of the flute and xylophone, and later by the violin, which repeat the melody. The desolation is palpable in this track sung in English that goes: "No, I don't speak anymore, and what could I say? Since there's no one, there's nothing to say... I wish to speak, to share things, but there is no hope, there is no one here... There is no-one, and no-one is there". The words refer to Anna Varney's experience of isolation from the world, closed off in his room for two years, in the dark and with the risk of losing sight, without communicating with others.

Sure, if you're inviting friends to dinner, you won't play a Sopor CD as background any more than you'd play the "Dies Irae" from Verdi's Requiem (out of respect for the superiority of the latter). If you're full of good cheer and intend to keep it, listening to S. A. is not advisable. If it's true that the boundaries between pain and pleasure are uncertain, the type of pleasure derived from this type of music presupposes emotional participation in the artist's pain. Pain that materializes almost in phrases full of pathos and in the suffering singing that is sometimes broken up. As written by mementomori in their review of Songs from the Inverted Womb, the listening becomes "a sort of transfer from pain into pain" which has the intensity of a psychoanalytic session. For me, the aforementioned tracks go straight to the gut, barely passing through the ears!

To finish, a note on the lyrics. With some exceptions, like the autobiographical No One is There from this album, many common elements and themes in gothic dark — cemeteries, skeletons, desire for death — are presented with a raw, Nordic macabre taste. For example:

Death and decay, cadaverous smell,
for us there's neither heaven, nor is there a hell,
and only the stigmata could be able to betray
the sombre existence of the former days